Environmental devastation. Local militancy. Smuggling. Violence. All of these describe the Niger Delta, the crude-oil extraction center of Nigeria. Philip Aghoghovwia offers a unique interpretation of the region's petroviolence, examining the cultural aspects of the extraction industry in the societies within which it operates. As he considers the charged and often clashing contexts of the    More >

From the early Yiddish silent movies, to the innovative Soviet-supported productions of the 1920s, to the Golden Age of the 1930s, to the present revival of the genre, Eric Goldman traces the history of Yiddish cinema and the people who shaped its development. Goldman viewed scores of films (some of them considered lost) and combed archives in Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the United    More >

To update this rich, informative collection of life histories, Davison returned to Mutira in 1989, 1992, and 1994, documenting the changes occurring since her 1984 study. Six of the seven life histories in the first edition have been expanded to reflect the events of the last decade. Two new introductory chapters frame the life histories within the context both of the significant macrolevel    More >

Through jungle and razed landscapes, Binka Le Breton journeyed more than 3,000 miles by bus, truck, boat, and on foot to record the candid words of the people who make the Brazilian Amazon region their home. The compelling  result, Voice of the Amazon, reveals the textures of daily life in the Amazon forest.    More >

Poignant and thought-provoking, this anthology offers a representative selection from the past three decades of works by the best-known women writers in Saudi Arabia. The authors’ stories of their patriarchal society afford rare insight into the traditional and changing roles, relationships, and expectations of modern Saudi women. The editors provide an introductory essay on modern Saudi    More >

Spanning more than a century, this systematic study brings to the forefront a dazzling array of novels by Arab women writers. Bouthaina Shaaban's analysis ranges from the work of Zaynab Fawwaz, published at the end of the nineteenth century, to that of Sahar Khalifah and Najwa Barakat, published at the cusp of the twenty-first. The novels discussed reflect not only specifically Arab    More >

How do individual Africans view competitive elections? How do they behave at election time? What are the implications of new forms of popular participation for citizenship and democracy? Drawing on a decade of research from the cross-national Afrobarometer project, the authors of this seminal collection explore the emerging role of mass politics in Africa's fledgling democracies.    More >

"The sinews of war," posited Cicero, "are infinite money." Can the same be said of security? Tackling this thought-provoking question, the authors of Waging War with Gold show how states across the centuries have weaponized the global finance domain—a constellation of economic, legal, and monetary relations—in order to exert influence and pursue national interests.    More >

In the past, posits Christopher Coker, wars were all-encompassing; they were a test not only of individual bravery, but of an entire community's will to survive. In the West today, in contrast, wars are tools of foreign policy, not intrinsic to the values of a society—they are instrumental rather than existential. The clash between these two "cultures of war" can be seen    More >

This ethnographic study of Cape Verde tackles critical development issues: the struggle for self–sufficient food security, the tension between agricultural production and natural resource sustainability, and the appropriate role of government policy in food production and natural resource management. Cape Verde has moved into an ecological imbalance between the sustainable production    More >